First Steps. Again.
Swag. Essential to any student’s life.
I know I already wrote about first steps, and then failed to write another entry for the last almost year. I KNOW. My lack of direction was a bit of a blocker to any meaningful progress, and while I did scan several hundred more slides it was a daunting and uphill climb without a clear direction. This has, of course, changed! In trying to understand what form this Marian project should take and how this Foundation should be led, I’ve been torn between several avenues.
The most obvious (since you’re reading this) is to set up the Foundation and let it run, but I felt I needed more experience and technical know-how to be its leader effectively.
The next option was to write a book, which I still intend to do, but that circles back to the research portion of this Foundation’s aims and my own goals: how do I learn what I need to know to make a book interesting and relevant?
The final option, and the one that I’ve gone for in the end, was to pursue a PhD studying Marian’s work to help contextualise everything I was learning and gain access to proper oversight and guidance from academics. This (perhaps unsurprisingly since it’s the last option I’ve mentioned) is the direction I chose to go.
Working with Mary Schoeser and her formidable network of friends and experts, it took time to find the right home for the project. Through a series of contacts and enquiries I found Jade Halbert, a fashion historian working out of the University of Leeds and a protege of Mary’s friend Leslie. Leslie is herself a titan in the field so I was very glad when Jade agreed to support my application to Leeds.
That process went quickly and smoothly, and I’m pleased to say I started at the University of Leeds as a Postgraduate Researcher last week. While it’s still early days, I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the reading and the rigour. I’ve met with Jade and my other supervisors already, and had the grand tour of Leeds and all its many delights.
The next 4-5 years will be spent analysing the key questions surrounding my initial proposal, though inevitably the themes and questions will change as I read more and my understanding of Marian’s art and the influences surrounding it matures. For now, however, we’re asking:
What was the influence of Marian’s work on American fashion at and after the height of its popularity?
How was her multi-cultural artistic sensibility emblematic of increasing globalism in the 20th century, and how was it innovative?
What effect did her work have in challenging racial/gender boundaries in the 70s/80s in the US? What was its subsequent legacy?
How does analysis of Marian’s work interact with body culture methodologies and how does it challenge the current perception of performance art?
Tackling these question is a big job, and I don’t yet have a single question or argument to tie them all together. I’m reassured that this will come in time, and I have a year to read and form this question as I complete my lit review. At this early stage, I’m thinking of breaking the project into 5 sections, each with a particular focus. At the moment, these are:
Artist
This is where all the lofty talk about art movements and critical theory will live. Marian’s work has some fascinating intersections that bring up exciting questions on the boundaries between performance art and fashion, highlight the close relationship of body culture with fashion, but also pushes at the boundaries with the inclusion of the artwear work she completed and her career as a maker, not a fashion designer. Marian also had some completely entrancing views about what the intention of her craft was.
Once she moved off the wall, Marian worked from a ‘body-as-canvas’ principle, but elevated the usual approach of the body as the vehicle for the art piece. Marian felt instead that the art-object was the fusion of the wearer and the garment, the experience and (if I may) the performance of being together. This fusion was tactile as well as visual, and creates very interesting implications on where artwear ends, fashion begins, and what it means for the Clayden pieces out there today.
Designer
Here I’ll talk about Marian’s career as an artist-craftsman. Pulling her surface design off the wall and onto the body, Marian’s approach to art to wear remained a constant feature of her later commercial design. I’d like to take a good look into the influences floating around here throughout her career and see how they fed into her designs but also her success. Was the resurgence of luxury as a marketable trait in fashion responsible for her skyrocketing to fame? How did the Beat Generation’s counterculture seeds of the flower child movement intersect with Marian’s dye work? Was she always ahead of her time or was her whole career a series of lucky breaks as her style and artistic methods innovated to the greatest extent in whatever art form was popular at the time?
Most of this section will be looking at the history and influences around her and her place within the dyeing, artwear, and fashion movements to see what made Marian’s art so special and so noteworthy.
Feminist
Feminism and a strong centring of women and their experiences and relationship to society cannot be overstated as drivers and influences with Marian’s art and career. Born to a widowed mother and raised with her sister by her mother and spinster aunt in working-class Lancashire, Marian’s early life was soaked in an unwavering belief that women could achieve and provide to no less an extent than men. Social programmes brought about after World War II helped transform Marian’s natural aptitude into social mobility through access to grammar schools and teacher training, setting her up to meet young, urban individuals during her work as a teacher. This would lead to her marriage and her husband’s career would launch her into the middle class as a mother before she became a maker.
Riding the post-war wave of economic prosperity Marian then found herself dyeing and the lifelong learning of indigenous dyeing techniques, often from women, helped add complexity to her art. Working amongst an all-female artist’s collective—Group 9— in California, she and her contemporaries brought the traditionally female art of textile making into conversation at the highest levels of art, assisted by pioneers like Deborah Rapoport. At the height of her career, her atelier produced garments locally from high quality materials, overseeing a team of all women to make and produce all of her most luxurious garments. Her feminist roots and the work she did throughout her career help tie her success back to the work done by the women who came before and those who push the limits of art now.
Entrepreneur
The enduring story of Marian Clayden is that of her business. The rest of the thesis focusses on her artistic motivations but it’s important to point out that her commercial success was (in Marian’s own words) entirely the product of her husband Roger’s efforts. Roger was a consultant and engineer by trade, with expertise overseeing the management of manufacturing for major machinery and technology. Putting his considerable skills to work for Marian’s business was a coup for her, and his cost-saving measures are a template for future businesses to use as inspiration.
In the style of many small to medium sized designers of the time (Marion Donaldson and Barbra Hulanicki come to mind) , the woman’s touch came out in the work, and the husbands toiled behind the scenes to keep everything humming.
World Traveller
I’d like a better heading for this one, since this just sounds like a BA Economy Class Ticket, but this chapter is going to cast a light on the postcolonial globalisation rampant in the latter half of the twentieth century as a catalyst for Marian’s art and as a potential contributor to its uniqueness. Indigenous people, celebrating their newfound freedom from centuries of colonial occupation, revived and celebrated traditional art forms at the same time Marian was travelling throughout Indonesia, India, and China.
Marian was adamant about absorbing these techniques into her own art, but the question remains about how that influence changed her work and augmented it. There are also some important and interesting questions about the reception and use of indigenous techniques as received by a (then) middle-class white woman operating out of the United States. Cultural appropriation by white artists is nothing new, but examining the exploitation of indigenous work and its impact/influence vs a received and appreciative approach may yield interesting insights.
Consider, as a small example, that although Marian learned her dyeing techniques from a white English woman through a book: Anne Maile’s Tie and Dye as Present Day Craft. Maile does attribute the craft’s history to indigenous groups despite saying “it is uncertain where it originated” but does not credit any particular method with her technical advice, stripping the cultural significance from various acts and processes. Marian, on the other hand, spent time working with local cultures and referred to her work as “plangi”, a Malay word for a particular method of dyeing. Jack Lenor Larson also described her work in as “tritik” as well as plangi, again using the local words to describe the techniques and effects. It wasn’t until later that the term “tie-dye” would come to refer to the Western use of the same techniques to produce hippy garments, with no tie back to their originating cultures.
How did Marian’s approach differ from other artists at the time? How did her work learning from other cultures make her work different than work produced from designers who drew inspiration from colonial views?
Some of Leeds’ best and brightest
All of these questions and sections above will be teased out over the coming years, and most of these update posts will be focussed on my reading and learning over the first year at least but I’m really excited to be getting stuck in! Watch this space.